RESEARCH PAPER
A folk-psychological ranking of personality facets
 
 
More details
Hide details
1
Verve Rehabilitation, Oulu, Finland
 
 
Submission date: 2016-05-26
 
 
Final revision date: 2016-09-13
 
 
Acceptance date: 2016-09-15
 
 
Online publication date: 2016-10-10
 
 
Publication date: 2016-12-05
 
 
Current Issues in Personality Psychology 2016;4(4):187-195
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Background
Which personality facets should a general personality test measure? No consensus exists on the facet structure of personality, the nature of facets, or the correct method of identifying the most significant facets. However, it can be hypothesized (the lexical hypothesis) that high frequency personality describing words more likely represent important personality facets and rarely used words refer to less significant aspects of personality.

Participants and procedure
A ranking of personality facets was performed by studying the frequency of the use of popular personality adjectives in causal clauses (because he is a kind person) on the Internet and in books as attributes of the word person (kind person).

Results
In Study 1, the 40 most frequently used adjectives had a cumulative usage frequency equal to that of the rest of the 295 terms studied. When terms with a higher-ranking dictionary synonym or antonym were eliminated, 23 terms remained, which represent 23 different facets. In Study 2, clusters of synonymous terms were examined. Within the top 30 clusters, personality terms were used 855 times compared to 240 for the 70 lower-ranking clusters.

Conclusions
It is hypothesized that personality facets represented by the top-ranking terms and clusters of terms are important and impactful independent of their correlation with abstract underlying personality factors (five/six factor models).
Compared to hierarchical personality models, lists of important facets probably better cover those aspects of personality that are situated between the five or six major domains.
REFERENCES (32)
1.
Ames, D. R., & Bianchi, E. C. (2008). The agreeableness asymmetry in first impressions: perceiver’s impulse to (Mis)judge agreeableness and how it is moderated by power. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1719–1736.
 
2.
Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. G. (1936). Trait names: a psycholexial study. Psychological Monographs, 47, 1.
 
3.
Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2007). Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 150–166.
 
4.
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Boies, K. (2015). One-through six-component solutions from ratings on familiar English personality-descriptive adjectives. Journal of Individual Differences, 36, 183–189.
 
5.
Cattell, R. B. (1946). The description and measurement of personality. New York: World Book.
 
6.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). NEO PI-R Professional Manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
 
7.
Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990‐present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
 
8.
Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative “description of personality”: The Big‐Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216–1229.
 
9.
Google. (2015). How Google search works. https://support.google.com/web....
 
10.
Hampson, S. E., Goldberg, L. R., & John, O. P. (1987). Category breadth and social desirability values for 573 personality terms. European Journal of Personality, 1, 241–258.
 
11.
Hofstee, W. K. B., De Raad, B., & Goldberg, L. R. (1992). Integration of the Big Five and circumplex approaches to trait structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 146–163.
 
12.
John, O., & Srivastava, S. (1999). Big Five Trait Taxonomy. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 102–138). New York: Guilford.
 
13.
Klages, L. (1932). The science of character. London: Allen & Unwin.
 
14.
Leising, D., Scharloth, J., Lohse, O., & Wood, D. (2014). What types of terms do people use when describing an individual’s personality? Psychological Science, 25, 1787–1794.
 
15.
Loehlin, J. C., & Goldberg, L. R. (2014). Do personality traits conform to lists or hierarchies? Personality and Individual Differences, 70, 51–56.
 
16.
McAdams, D. P. (1992). The five-factor model in personality: A critical appraisal. Journal of Personality, 60, 329–361.
 
17.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. (2003). Personality in adulthood. A Five-factor theory perspective. New York: Guilford Press.
 
18.
Merriam-Webster. (2016). Merriam-Webster online: Dictionary and Thesaurus. http://www.merriam-webster.com.
 
19.
Michel, J. B., Shen, Y. K., Aiden, A. P., Veres, A., Gray, M. K., Google Books Team, Pickett, J. P., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., Orwant, J., Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A., & Aiden, E. L. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331, 176–182.
 
20.
Mottus, R. (2016). Towards more rigorous personality trait-outcome research. European Journal of Personality, 30, 292–303.
 
21.
Paunonen, S. V., & Ashton, M. C. (2001). Big-five factors and facets and the prediction of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 524–539.
 
22.
Roivainen, E. (2013). Frequency of the use of English personality adjectives: Implications for personality theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 47, 417–420.
 
23.
Roivainen, E. (2015). Personality adjectives in twitter tweets and in the google books corpus. an analysis of the facet structure of the openness factor of personality. Current Psychology, 34, 621–625.
 
24.
Roivainen, E. (2015). The Big Five factor markers are not especially popular words. Are they superior descriptors? Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 49, 590–599.
 
25.
Rushton, J. P, & Irwing, P. (2011). The general factor of personality: Normal and abnormal. In T. Chamorro-Premuzic, S. von Stumm, & A. Furnham (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Individual Differences (pp. 132–161). West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
 
26.
Saucier, G., & Goldberg, L. (1996). Evidence for the Big Five in analyses of familiar English personality adjectives. European Journal of Personality, 10, 61–77.
 
27.
Saucier, G. (1997). Effects of variable selection on the factor structure of person descriptors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1296–1312.
 
28.
Uher, J. (2013). Personality psychology: Lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts reveal only half of the story. Why it is time for a paradigm shift. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 47, 1–55.
 
29.
Uher, J. (2015). Conceiving “personality”: Psychologists’ challenges and basic fundamentals of the Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 49, 398–458.
 
30.
Wood, D. (2015). Testing the lexical hypothesis: Are socially important traits more densely reflected in the English lexicon? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108, 317–335.
 
31.
Wood, D., Nye, C. D., & Saucier, G. (2010). Identification and measurement of a more comprehensive set of person-descriptive trait markers from the English lexicon. Journal of Research in Personality, 44, 258–272.
 
32.
Ziegler, M., & Bäckström, M. (2016). 50 Facets of a Trait 50-Ways to Mess Up? European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 32, 105–110.
 
Copyright: © Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk This is an Open Access journal, all articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
eISSN:2353-561X
ISSN:2353-4192
Journals System - logo
Scroll to top